In the central nervous system of fish and frogs, some, but not all, axons can regenerate. Retinal ganglion cells are among those that can. The retinae of fish and frogs produce new retinal neurons, including ganglion cells, for months or years after hatching. We have evaluated the hypothesis that retinal axonal regeneration is obligatorily linked to continued production of new ganglion cells. W...

Retinal implants are intended to help patients with degenerative conditions by electrically stimulating surviving cells to produce artificial vision. However, little is known about how individual retinal ganglion cells respond to direct electrical stimulation in degenerating retina. Here we used a transgenic rat model to characterize ganglion cell responses to light and electrical stimulation d...

Patients with schizophrenia have altered visual cognition and retinal functions. No studies explored if anomalies are related to the presence of hallucinations (VH). We functional responses ganglion cells in patients or without VH conducted a neuropsychological evaluation explore links between function. The VH+ group showed poorer we found correlations amplitudes P50 N95 waves cognition. Our re...

Magnification, the relative size of the neural representation of a portion of the visual field, decreases more rapidly with increasing visual field eccentricity in striate cortex than in the retinal ganglion cell layer of the owl monkey (Aotus trivirgatus); the proportion of the cells in striate cortex devoted to central vision is much larger than the comparable proportion of retinal ganglion c...

In mice, Brn3 POU domain transcription factors play essential roles in the differentiation and survival of projection neurons within the retina, inner ear, dorsal root and trigeminal ganglia. During retinal ganglion cell differentiation, Brn3b is expressed first, followed by Brn3a and Brn3c. Targeted deletion of Brn3b, but not Brn3a or Brn3c, leads to a loss of most retinal ganglion cells befor...

The adult ferret has approximately 90,000 retinal ganglion cells, arranged in a prominent area centralis and visual streak. The role of differential cell generation, cell death, and retinal growth in the control of adult retinal ganglion cell number and distribution was evaluated by examining basic aspects of retinogenesis, including growth in retinal area, developmental changes in the number, ...

The development of neuroprotective strategies to attenuate retinal ganglion cell death could lead to novel therapies for chronic optic neuropathies such as glaucoma. Intravitreal transplantation of mesenchymal stem cells slows retinal ganglion cell death in models of optic nerve injury, but the mechanism of action remains unclear. Here we characterized the neuroprotective effects of mesenchymal...

Previous work has shown that production of retinal ganglion cells is in part regulated by inhibitory factors secreted by ganglion cell themselves; however, the identities of these molecules are not known. Recent studies have demonstrated that the signaling molecule Sonic hedgehog (Shh) secreted by differentiated retinal ganglion cells is required to promote the progression of ganglion cell diff...

Abstract Stimulation of axons or its avoidance plays a central role for neuroprosthetics and neural-interfaces research. One peculiar example constitutes retinal implants. Retinal implants aim to artificially activate ganglion cells (RGCs) via electrical stimulation. Such stimulation, however, often generates undesired stimulation RGC axon bundles, which leads distorted visual percepts. In orde...

While the essential role of bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) signaling in nervous system development is well established, its function in the adult CNS is poorly understood. We investigated the role of BMP signaling in the adult mouse retina following damage in vivo. Intravitreal injection of N-methyl-D-aspartic acid (NMDA) induced extensive retinal ganglion cell death by 2 days. During this pe...